Brazil Voids Merck Patent On AIDS Drug 765
JoeBackward writes "Merck has this useful anti-AIDS drug Elfavirenz, and Brazil has lots of poor people with AIDS. So, after trying really hard to get Merck to cooperate on pricing, the Brazilian government has decided to take a 'compulsory license' to the patent, and get the drug from a factory in India. This compulsory license is basically a way to take the patent by eminent domain." This move gives Brazil one more thing in common with Thailand, both of which have blocked YouTube. Thailand's compulsory licensing of Elfavirenz and Plavix has landed the country on the US's watch list for piracy.
humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
who can really put a price on that?
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Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:4, Informative)
Where get the $1e9 dollars per drug? Lots of places. Here's a couple:
The Tufts CSDD studies [tufts.edu] is a good source, their estimate was $900 mil four years ago.
Medical News Today [medicalnewstoday.com] estimates $1.2 billion for a new biological
Essentially, when you want the drug companies to give away a drug, you want to expropriate their property. As an investor, ask yourself whether you're willing to put your money into an industry that's subject to expropriation, and think about whether you want a drug industry around or not the next time a pesky little virus emerges from the forrest.
Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the government is so good at running things?
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Like all things in life, an element of greed is involved with healthcare. Also like all things in life, that same greed drives competition which forces participants to be better than average. We're built that way down to the very cell (Ever see an amoeba engulf another on
Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't believe the FUD. Socialized health care is more efficient and cheaper per capita than your broken free market system:
http://www.thestar.com/News/article/204163 [thestar.com]
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Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, it cost them a lot to make it. But this isn't a drug whose need is going to go away any time soon and trying to remake your investment quickly means that poor people can't buy something that can save their life. Crix whatever should've been priced in such a way so that 10-12 years down the road they began making a profit, not so that they start making profit almost immediately. I mean, what investor wouldn't invest in an AIDS drug just because they're not likely to recoup their losses within a year? We all know AIDS is going to be around for a while, cut your prices so that more people can get it.
But hey, just my opinion. Hopefully Brazil can start getting cheap crix out in their country and save some lives.
Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Funny)
That being said, we might also want to remember that RIAA members need copyright durations of artist's death + 1000000 years in order to compensate for all those failed artists.
And let us not forget that not every hole exxon drills yields oil, which makes $3.50/gallon a reasonable price for 85 octane gas.
Furthermore, we should bear in mind that baby seals are vastly overpopulated
Re:humanity vs capitalism BS (Score:3, Insightful)
Eminent domain is needed for cases like this where the need of the people outweigh the need for a ceo to trim his jet interior in pure gold.
Good for Brazil
Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
knowledge did
peopel living in the capitalist state took advantage of the fact they had that knowledge
This is a very slippery slope -when does this end? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes I know that giant pharm firms spend a lot on advertising, but it also costs approximately one Billion dollars to get a single new drug to the marketplace (that's $1,000,000,000 !!)
Pricing is a problem for the third world countries, probably because it takes so many resources to make that product.
Now please pay attention - I'm not saying that Brazil is unjustified in it's taking of the drug and helping those people, but rather that there needs to be some limits so that this behavior is not abused, and ruins it for everyone. This sounds like a good problem for the U.N.
Re:This is a very slippery slope -when does this e (Score:5, Insightful)
There are several significant factors undercutting this supposed billion dollar price tag. The first is that AIDS research has received significant public funding, and second is that antiretroviral drugs have the shortest time to approval of any class of drugs, approximately half the time of normal clinical trials (the mean time for antiretrovirals is 44.6 months, compared to an industry average of 87.4 months).
See this report [thebody.com] from Doctors Without Boarders for more information.
Link to average billion dollar new drug cost (Score:3, Insightful)
The Vioxx lawsuit is costing Merck between 4 and 30 billion$ for some shaky scientific evidence. There were perhaps 300-400 people who doctors though had deaths DIRECTLY contributable to Vio
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The people who did the work got paid. Its the corporation who is getting ripped off, not any people.
Re:This is a very slippery slope -when does this e (Score:3, Informative)
A-haha, haha... [tear] I would like some of that stuff you are smoking.
Mentioning stealing is just a troll. And it is perfectly OK not to pay people when they do not work for you. I live in US, and even here I believe that these people do not work for me. I'll pay them for the research results when I can tell them what to do. Why should Brazil
Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's some basic reading for you on how Big Pharma is gaming the patent system for their own short-sighted gain:
http://www.nationmultimedia.com/2007/04/21/opinio
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17244 [nybooks.com]
http://archive.salon.com/tech/htww/2006/01/13/dru
http://www.cepr.net/index.php?option=com_content&
National Socialism vs. fascism (Score:3, Insightful)
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who can really put a price on that?
*Raises hand* OOh! I can!
The number of years added to the lives of the Brazilians who get this drug at a reduced cost will be subtracted several times over from future AIDS victims who would have otherwise have had better drugs available due to the added research dollars.
In short, adding 10 days more life now = subtracting 20 days more life in the future (arbitrary but realistic figure). People who want to ban patents on drugs
You would have a point... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely silly. But it's a good measure here. Looks like Big Pharma's line of shit is considerably more effective than the RIAA and MPAA. Here's hoping they don't catch on.
Here's the reality of the situation. The biggest expense to Big Pharma is not research and development (which mainly takes place in universities, including a lot of public ones. Big Pharma does not fund those. You and I do.) It is not testing (and that could be handled entirely by the FDA, without their involvement at all. A lot of it already is. Big Pharma does not pay for the FDA. You and I do.) Their biggest expense is not manufacturing the pharmaceuticals, which, as should be obvious here, can be done pretty cheaply. Their biggest expense is wining, dining, and schmoozing doctors to use their medicines. To advertise on TV, to get patients to push doctors into getting them whatever medication that is. And to pay overpaid executives.
Let's cut out the middleman, and one of the biggest expenses here-the millions-per-year CEOs. Fund the universities well to develop the drugs. They will develop drugs for Third-World maladies, once the impetus to "make something you can sell" is gone. Have the FDA entirely in charge of testing, and farming out production-just production-to corporate entities. There we go.
Under the current system, there's far more incentive to look for treatments rather than cures. A treatment is a lifelong paycheck, a cure is a one-time payment. There's far too much impetus to develop Viagra rather than treatments for diseases that kill millions in poor countries. There's far too big a temptation to hold back a slightly-improved formulation until the patent on the current one is about to expire, and to use it to extend the patent far longer than it was intended to last. If that system collapses, I won't shed too many tears. Something better will replace it.
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There are a few problems with this argument:
1. If Brazil had gotten the drugs for the price they wanted, Merck would still have made a profit, whereas Brazil was not going/able to pay what Merck was asking, so the alternative is no profit, and fewer research dollar
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Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Interesting)
Right. And in this case, the Brazilian government, whose AIDS policy is a model being copied by other countries worldwide, makes sure every single HIV and AIDS patient in Brazil has the medicines. It therefore has huge bargaining power, because it represents such a large number of patients. The former Health Minister, the man responsible for Brazil's AIDS policy, is José Serra, currently the governor of São Paulo state (think of it as being like holding the offices of governor of California and New York and you start to get an idea of the importance of that post). Before anyone cries for the poor drug companies, there are a few important facts you need to know. First, when Serra was still Health Minister, the drug companies decided to try to make more money since the government was buying up everything. They tried to increase their prices when they were already reaping massive profits (all these drugs are mature products in the "cash cow" phase of the product lifecycle, so the BS "paying for research" argument doesn't fly in this case) at the old price. And now the Brazilian government is asking that Merck charge the same price here as they charge in Thailand. And you can be sure Merck is not selling at that price in Thailand as a public service - they are making a profit there too.
When Serra originally went to the two largest makers of AIDS drugs that sell in Brazil, he showed them that the Brazilian constitution permits the Health Minister to determine that a given epidemic is an emergency situation, and in case of emergencies, the Federal Government, on the recommendation of the Health Minister, can break patents. Serra went to the companies and told them he didn't want to do that, but that they would have to negotiate with him in good faith or he would simply break their patents. As I recall, one went along and the other balked for a time, until they saw that Serra wasn't bluffing and was really going to allow Brazilian pharma companies to manufacture the patented drug. I'm surprised the president had to go this far, but the drug companies may have decided to improve their bottom line by doing a little gouging of AIDS patients in Brazil. I'm proud of the government for not knuckling under to Big Pharma. If only the US government would see that and be shamed into actually standing up to Big Pharma on any issue, any issue at all. Instead, you all (I fled 7 years ago) will have to deal with health care prices spiraling out of control until almost nobody can afford it. I have to tell you I'm happy to be in Brazil, a country that actually cares about its residents' health. Yes, I said RESIDENTS. I'm not even a citizen yet! Brazil isn't xenophobic like the USA either, and does not see me, an immigrant, as some kind of threat or some kind of outsider to be treated like crap. Contrast that with how immigrants are treated in the USA these days... I understand there were huge anti-immigration rallies in the USA last week.
Just a quick disclaimer: I think Serra was one hell of a great Health Minister. In addition to standing up to Big Pharma on AIDS drugs, he was also the one who successfully pushed for a law permitting generic drugs (before him, there were none in Brazil), something you can be sure the price gougers from Big Pharma were opposing every step of the way. Serra was really brave to stand up to them on those two points, and I'm proud of him for doing it. He also worked hard (from the executive branch) with the Brazilian Congress to pass a modern organ donation law in Brazil, basically doing away with the black market for transplantable organs that existed before. All that said, I don't think Serra would be much of a president, and I can't say I'm unhappy he lost in his bid for the presidency in 2002. I suspect he'll run again in 2010, because the current president, who is serving his second consecutive term and is still massively p
Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Informative)
Talks over the price of Merck's drug, Efavirenz, broke off on Thursday when the health ministry rejected the New Jersey-based company's offer to cut its $1.59 per pill price by 30 percent. Brazil wanted to pay what Merck charges Thailand, or $0.65 per pill.
They TRIED to negotiate, and Merck put up a wall. So, in effect, Merck DID refuse Brazil.
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See a decent explanation of compulsory licensing here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_license [wikipedia.org]
Brazil has fulfilled the "attempts to obta
Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
You say that as if "IP" were a God-given right. It's not: "IP" is a collection of government entitlement programs, and what a government gives, a government can take away.
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Because you called cancelling *one single* patent, an action that could save many thousands of lives (and which they are entitled to do under international law), "IP scoffing". Therefore, you must value the IP at least as dearly as the lives of the thousands who would perish.
A "silver lining" is an inferior outcome. I.e, you admit that helping those patients survive was OK, bu
Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:4, Insightful)
That argument would work if the market was actually free. As long as those same politicians are needed to have those nice patents, they also happen to get a say in things.
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In this case, the market is the one doing the deciding. The Brazilians are going with the lowest bidder. So what's the problem?
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If there are lessons here, I guess it is that the 3rd world is f*cked as the developed world can pay beacoup $$$ for health
Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
So in Brazil, in fact, the dangers of AIDS are made very clear by the excellent educational portion of the AIDS policy. Further, unlike the USA, insane religious fanatics don't have the power to push idiocy like the "abstinence only" sex education pushed in a lot of places in the USA despite having been repeatedly proven not to decrease teen pregnancy at all, but proven to lead to increased incidence of STDs, including AIDS. So let me bounce it right backatcha and say it sure is nice to live in a country where the public interest is placed above the sensitivities of lunatics who want to impose their beliefs on others, even if imposition of those beliefs can be a death sentence.
Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:4, Insightful)
- RG>
Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Interesting)
the US is known for using "abstinence" only, and not providing any barrier methods. that is plain stupid, and defies human nature.
the country with the highest abstinence age, lowest STI rate and highest public awareness is Holland. Sex education starts at 5, and teaches that sex is normal, fun but overall has to be SAFE. and it works. and your system doesnt
GUess you;ll just go down the toilet then.
Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
Finally, you made the classic straw man of suggesting because I liked ONE aspect therefore I must like it all. I agree Holland has problems, however it is a MUCH bettwer country to live in than the US. Much more free, in the ACTUAL versus religious rights idea of it....
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Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:4, Informative)
References please?
"Teens Need Access to Contraceptives, Not Abstinence Messages, To Reduce Pregnancy, STD Rates, AAP Report Says" (AAP: American Academy of Pediatrics). http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?n
Original report here:
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content
Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
Merck does have a right to recoup their development costs-after all they have to save up for the next round of drug liability lawsuits like the vioxx fiasco.
Still, they ought to play smarter and drop costs when countries try to negotiate price-the tactic of countries taking a compulsory license is a big weapon against which they have no counter. They could sell AIDS and malaria drugs cheap and look like angels whilst continuing to price gouge for boner pills. Problem solved!
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Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Informative)
Oh goody, the moralistic argument.
First, it needn't surprise you that there are all kinds of ways one person can compel another to engage in sexual intercourse. And I'm not just talking about rape and prostitution either.
Second, there are all kinds of ways one person can come into contact with another's blood. In a country with a sufficiently high HIV prevalence, any car accident, mugging, or fistfight might result in infection. And while the First World now has pretty good testing regimes for blood transfusions, are you sure that's the case everywhere?
If you think every fistfight is voluntary: on CBC radio a couple of weeks ago, they had an example (from Tanzania I believe) where a guy had gotten beat up while defending his elderly neighbour's house from burglars, and contracted HIV in the process.
So cut the moralizing "they all made their choices" crap.
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And yes, I know what I'm talking about.
This industry, much like the MAFIAA, deserve to die. Human beings don't.
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But there is nothing that prevents a company from setting insanely high prices because most of the wealthy patients are shielded from the real cost. Nati
Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:4, Interesting)
If I get a prescription medicine in the UK, I have absolutely no idea what the brand name is. My doctor will never identify it by name, the prescription will say how many milligrams of the chemical name I need, and the pharmacy will fill that with the branded or unbranded equivalents (usually unbranded, in a generic bottle with a label printed by them).
To anyone outside the USA, the whole concept of advertising prescription drugs to the general public seems absurd, and somewhat ironic for a company in the middle of a 'war on drugs.'
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It's a mentality like this that will lead to the downfall of the human race. Disease knows no race, religion, nationality, or income bracket. Have you ever watched a person you care for waste away because they couldn't afford the medication they needed? I thought not.
Sorry buddy, the number of poor in this world by far exceed the
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Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
Not all moves to place fetters on the free market are the result of the hidden agendas of slavering, bloody thirsty autocrats, despite the media's attempt to make it seem so. The free market will not feed the poor, or give them medication or save their lives, as none of those activities are profitable. Ideas that save human life are the property of every human alive, and I will fight until the day I die the rights of people to unreasonably profit from or withhold those ideas from humankind. Those of you about to jump in with "but who'd pay for the research" arguments, pull your pants back up and get away from me. I've heard them all before and written on the subject [mrnaz.com] many times. If our society cannot place a value on the saving of life itself, then we need to have a good, long, hard look at the belief that our society is the greatest one on Earth.
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Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Interesting)
Flash-forward to the early 1980s and the frightening early years of the AIDS crisis where there was absolutely nothing in the way of effective treatments for the first six years of the epidemic. It was pure hospice care until the National Cancer Institute took another look at AZT and found that it was the first drug that HIV seemed to respond to. The patent was assigned to Burroughs-Wellcome who paid for drug trials and promptly began selling it two years later. Selling it at a price that made it the most expensive drugs ever marketed ($8,000+ a year per patient) - despite the fact it was developed with public money and was the only treatment available for a rapidly-spreading disease with a 100% mortality rate.
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Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Interesting)
>Where do you think the research for the next AIDS drug will come from?
Mostly funded by taxpayers, then handed over to Big Pharma, as usual.
"...the pharmaceutical industry is not especially innovative. As hard as it is to believe, only a handful of truly important drugs have been brought to market in recent years, and they were mostly based on taxpayer-funded research at academic institutions, small biotechnology companies, or the National Institutes of Health (NIH)."The Truth About the Drug Companies by Marcia Angell [nybooks.com]
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That's true, but entirely misleading. The cost of bringing these drugs to market absolutely dwarfs the cost of the research they were "based on". The total cost of getting a major drug to market is nearing $1 billion; I don't have a handy
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The NIH doesn't discover drugs. They discover enzymes, mechanisms, etc. Sometimes they come u
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I'm always confused by people who see it as humane to steal from one group to give to another. Maybe you could give your own money to the people who need it to pay for the drugs they need?
(Oh, and I love how my post has been moderated as a Troll, simply because someone disagrees with me. That comment was on topic, not trolling.)
Re:humanity vs capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's some basic reading for you:
http://www.nationmultimedia.com/2007/04/21/opinio
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17244 [nybooks.com]
http://archive.salon.com/tech/htww/2006/01/13/dru
http://www.cepr.net/index.php?option=com_content&
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Wow.
Good thing that patents aren't houses.
Patents are monopolies granted by the Government.
What the Government has given, the Government can take away.
Not to mention that WTO law allows for exactly what Brazil did.
Just to be clear, I don't want you modded down because I disagree with your statement (though I obviously do). I'd like to see you modded down be
youtube (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:youtube (Score:5, Informative)
bullshit (Score:3, Insightful)
Innovation is pretty safe (Score:4, Insightful)
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True, and for the record, I think this situation sucks from any angle. But maybe if they just set their price a little lower, they would be making more money than they will be now, and they wouldn't make people hate them.
Doing it over and over will kill innovation. Doing it a few times is tough love.
In any case, I think Merck's $4 billion in annual profits will keep them from having to
Re:bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Mereck said no so Brazil took it to save the lives of its people.
Considering its a global company, They should have taken Brazils offer and looked to Europe and N.America to recover costs.
OTOH, since Merick wouldn't sell to Brazil anyways, there not actually loosing money now, are they?
Good for Brazil (Score:2)
Hopefully we'll see this happening with software patents in the next few months.
"Black Box" Drugs? (Score:5, Interesting)
Right now, my understanding is that to produce and get approval for a drug, you need to release its chemical formula and other information about it.
But I wonder if at some point in the future, if the drug companies get too worried about their profits due to genericization in countries like Thailand and Brazil, that they might try to implement some sort of "drug DRM." Rather than making the composition of the drug open, don't release what's actually in it, and just test it as a 'black box,' show empirically through tests that it's effective and reasonably safe, but dope the actual pills with a lot of random substances that make it difficult to reverse-engineer (or have the actual drug only be something that's produced in the body through subtle combinations of various things in the pill, or keep the methods of producing the various chemicals in the pills a secret). I'm sure there are lots of bizarre ways that the drug companies could think up to protect the compositions.
Now, I'm not saying that any of these schemes would be effective at protecting the composition -- if the market for a generic drug is big enough, the labs in Thailand can probably afford to spend a lot of time with a mass spectrometer/gas chromatograph and unravel it, but that doesn't mean the drug companies wouldn't try, and waste a lot of time and effort in the process.
As we've seen in the battles over digital IP, there are a whole lot of things that can end up as collateral damage in the fights between rightsholders who see the gravy train slowing down, and people who want their products at a lower price than is being offered.
Re:"Black Box" Drugs? (Score:5, Insightful)
> and just test it as a 'black box,' show empirically through tests that it's effective and
> reasonably safe, but dope the actual pills with a lot of random substances that make it
> difficult to reverse-engineer
I really can't forsee any form of DRM for chemical compounds. It's quite like DRM for music - at one point the music has to be played on a speaker. Similarly, if you're going to make a drug, you're going to have to give the pill out at which point you have the whole field of analytical chemistry (mass spec, HPLC etc) at your disposal!
Furthermore, adding random substances to it, doesn't really hinder the identification process - they'd just show up as separate peaks on the spectrum. In addition randomly adding substances to a drug mixture would probably mess up pharmacokinetics which would have to be restudied all over again.
Unfortunately the chemical world is a little bit messier than the digital world
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Greed (Score:2, Interesting)
Eventually drug companies will stop selling (Score:2)
nonsense (Score:4, Insightful)
I live in Brazil, Youtube was never blocked here. (Score:4, Informative)
It was a BS case anyway, it was a public beach, everyone was there to see them having sex. If anyone was breaking the law, they were. Of course, with the justice system here as corrupt and moronic as it is, those kinds of rulings aren't surprising. Believe me though, 100% of the Brazilian people would be against any sort of ban.
IP vs. Humanity (Score:2, Insightful)
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See, the problem with your analogies is that they're simply wrong. Let me give you a better analogy. Merck finds some basic research that looks promising that can provide a one-shot complete cure to HIV. However, it will cost $10 billion to develop. They think for a minute... "hmm.. if we do this, will we
Mandatory link to TalkLikeAPirateDay .... (Score:2)
Argh Matey - Brazil Be a-Savin' Yer Scalliwageous Lives! http://www.talklikeapirate.com/ [talklikeapirate.com]
(Seriously, why make them walk the plank just for being humanitarian?)
U.S. Congress looking at reimportation... (Score:2)
Regards.
YouTube vs. 100-million AIDS victims??? (Score:2, Insightful)
This is a warped comparison... AIDS will hill hundreds of millions of people in our lifetime. YouTube is a floofy website. AIDS will still be a problem in 20 years. YouTube probably won't exist.
How are these two situations related, exactly? Are you trying to make some comparison because both involve "Intellectual Property"? If so, you failed.
Not without instructive precedent in the US (Score:5, Interesting)
Year 2007: Tens of thousand of people die in Brazil each year from AIDS because they cannot afford patented medication. Action from Brazil to force compulsory licensing is widely denounced as destroying the worldwide pharma industry, especially by US commentators.
Well...
Re:Not without instructive precedent in the US (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like the manufacturers couldn't produce the drugs, so the government stepped in to ramp up production. Not exactly what you made it sound like.
...because Bayer couldn't make enough of it. (Score:3, Insightful)
The compulsory license wasn't about cost. It was about capacity. And the US DID pay a license fee to the company, instead of outright theft, as Brazil is doing.
On the other hand, with the amounts i
The State giveth, the State taketh (Score:5, Insightful)
Patents are government-granted monopolies. It is not an absolute right and has to be balanced against the need of the People.
Reading this news as a fight between corporate greed and governmental greed is the wrong way to look at that. Right or wrong, you try to choose the lesser evil. Everyday the little citizen get crushed for reason of State, for once it is a big pharma that pays the price.
BTW, the pharma spammer are quick on the button today. Disgraceful.
Sickening display of capitalism (Score:3, Insightful)
If Merck can afford to sell the product to Thailand for $0.65 and still make a profit (clearly as an Indian company can sell it for $0.45 and turn a profit themselves) then there is no reason whatsoever other than pure capitalistic greed why they could not have given the same offer to the Brazilian government. Don't forget we're not talking about the variable domain costs of marketing and staffing, the government is the customer - how the Brazilian government then choose to distribute/market the treatment is their decision and at their cost.
There are a great many products around the World that are sold for different prices to different regions, but in practically all cases you can permit the corporations involved some latitude simply because the products they're selling are luxury or otherwise non-essential. Gouging a customer with a 300%+ markup on a life-saving drug when you know the customer/market HAS to have it is disgusting.
Let's not forget that the research dollars that went into developing this particular drug came from U.S citizens.
I don't think this is a sign of "erosion of respect in American patents", this is after all the first time the Brazilian government has even invoked the power of "eminent domain".
Meh, what can you do? (Score:4, Interesting)
Other countries, including Canada and Italy, have also used a clause in World Trade Organization rules to flout drug patents in the name of public health.
Under WTO rules, countries can issue a "compulsory license" to manufacture or buy generic versions of patented drugs deemed critical to public health.
bullshit (Score:3, Insightful)
A "compulsory license" is not the same as "taking a patent", it's a compulsory license, as the name implies.
Furthermore, the term "eminent domain" simply doesn't apply to patents because patents aren't "private property". Patents are temporary monopolies granted by the government for a specific purpose, and revoking that grant when the patent doesn't accomplish its purpose is not the same as taking away "private property". The only thing the government is ultimately obligated to observe in the granting and revocation of patents is that it is done non-discriminatorily.
Trying to equate a patent grant with private property is ideological bullshit; don't fall for it.
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Merck's spending breakdown (Score:5, Informative)
- Sales revenue: 22,636.0
So where does the money go?- Manufacturing costs: 6,001.1
- Marketing & adminstrative costs: 8,165.4
- R&D: 4,782.9
Only 20% of the price of each pill goes toward future research and development... Marketing & administrative costs are double that. Ouch.Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
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A) That would easily take 10+ years, they need the drug now
B) Brazil likely doesn't have the drug making infrastructure necessary to even start making AIDS drugs without 5+ years building
C) The odds of any drug beating AIDS is huge
So you want them to spend 15+ years working in hope that they can maybe get a drug working when there's a great one sitting on the market right now?
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I'm not saying it's just OK to confiscate drug formulations, pharmaceuticals is one of the very few areas where patents are generally a good thing, but in some cases it may be a legitimate national response. I'm sure they measured the consequences and are willing to pay the price from the fallout.
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Idiot.
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Most basic research is conducted using public money anyway, but applied research is something else. Unless the U.S. government is willing to finance ALL stages of drug discovery via NIH, they can't expect private companies to undertake fantastic risks and expenses, if their profits are not guaranteed.
I am not saying that what pharmaceutical com
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